Testing the limits of forum bashing: two law students sue over personal attacks

Two Yale Law students have filed a lawsuit against a web site administrator …

Two law school students filed a lawsuit against the administrator of a web site and 28 of the site's users last week for psychological and economic injury. The two plaintiffs, anonymously listed as Doe I and Doe II, are female students at Yale Law School and claim that the users of a third-party law school message board have consistently and regularly made such disparaging remarks about their characters that it has cost them not only their emotional wellbeing, but internships and jobs. And despite repeated requests to remove the offensive posts, the site's administrators continually refused to do so.

The posts occurred on AutoAdmit, a site that describes itself as the world's "most prestigious" college discussion board and claims to help students with law school information, hiring practices at law firms, and more. The comments against Doe I and II started as far back as 2005 when a poster from Doe I's undergrad university, Stanford, started a thread warning everyone at Yale Law School to "watch out" for her in a thread titled "Stupid Bitch to Attend Yale Law." Thus begun the string of public character assassinations, rumors, and (repeated) rape threats. Various users on the site also posted what she claims to be false information about her LSAT score, accused her of participating in a lesbian relationship with a Yale Law School administrator in order to gain admission, and encouraged others to warn law firms about her alleged illegitimacy.

Similarly in 2007, Doe II became the topic of several threads on AutoAdmit, focusing mostly on certain body parts (complete with pictures of her ripped from sites like Facebook) and also with repeated rape threats. Some posters encouraged others to stalk her and take more photographs, while continuing to encourage various lewd acts.

The complaint

In the complaint as seen by Ars Technica, Doe I and II claim to have lost sleep, fallen behind on schoolwork, suffered strained personal relationships with their families, and were forced to attend therapy as a result of the postings on AutoAdmit. Additionally, Doe I claims to have lost job prospects. She says that at some point, she applied for 16 different on-campus interviews at Yale, which resulted in a mere four callbacks and zero offers. "On information and belief, it is unprecedented for a second-year law student from Yale to participate in so many interviews without obtaining a single summer associate offer," the complaint reads. Her academic qualifications were similar to that of other classmates who had received offers, the complaint says.

The suit names the online pseudonyms of 28 anonymous posters on AutoAdmit in hopes of using subpoenas to identify them in real life. The two women are also suing site administrator Anthony Ciolli, who they say knowingly allowed and profited from these posts staying on the site despite AutoAdmit's "no outing" policy—a policy that states that posts that contain real-life information about other users will be deleted immediately. The women are also concerned that the posts on AutoAdmit are showing up in Google results when users perform queries on their names. The complaint itself mentions that several posters on AutoAdmit have attempted to "googlebomb" the women's names with defamatory comments, and that the first several Google hits for one of the women's names do in fact point to threads from AutoAdmit about them.

Fallout? What fallout?

Targeting Ciolli may prove difficult, however, partly because he did not author the posts himself. Ciolli may also be protected by laws stating that a site's administrators aren't responsible for the posts made by its users, such as the DMCA's Safe Harbor for copyrighted content. In March, Ciolli also told the Washington Post that his co-administrator, Jarret Cohen, was solely responsible for approving or deleting comments and that he had no authority to do so. As an interesting tidbit of side trivia, Ciolli—a law graduate himself—recently had an offer from a Boston law firm rescinded over his involvement with and the content on AutoAdmit, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Discovering the identities of the 28 posters could be difficult as well, since AutoAdmit apparently does not retain IP addresses for its users and does not require them to register with real names, according to the Washington Post—just valid e-mail addresses. However, those e-mail addresses could still eventually give away the identities of the posters involved, as it's probable that the e-mail service providers have more personal information stored about their users than AutoAdmit does and could be forced to give it up through subpoenas.

Ciolli and the AutoAdmit gang may not exactly have precedent on their side either. A student blogger from UC Berkeley recently lost a defamation case brought against him by journalist Lee Kaplan last week. The student, Yaman Salahi, had set up a blog called Lee Kaplan Watch in which Salahi cited articles written by Kaplan and publicly disputed various claims. Kaplan sued Salahi for business interference and libel, which Salahi lost in small claims court not once, but twice. On his blog, Salahi argues that because he was sued in small claims court and not a "real" court, he was unable to take advantage of California's anti-SLAPP—Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation—protections. "I have absolutely no doubt that had this lawsuit been filed in a real court, I would have won," Salahi wrote.

Doe I and II are asking for punitive damages in the amount of $245,000 as well as unspecified actual and special damages. The complaint also requests that the threads be permanently removed from AutoAdmit and that the administrators authorize Google to permanently remove cached versions of the threads.

Some experts believe that this case will go a long way towards testing the legal limits of anonymous Internet postings. University of Texas law professor Brian Leiter told Reuters that "the most vile posters on that board are two subpoenas away from being outed," which he says led to "much amusement" by AutoAdmit posters. "But they are about to find out that this is how it works," he added ominously.